We mounted I-40 at Kingman.
After a few miles, I pulled into an overlook of the Colorado River flowing south into infinity, Flanked by gray and purple mountains that stretched through a valley that extended into oblivion, the landscape begged a picture.
It accommodated all kinds of vehicles with a sidewalk path between the asphalt lot and a waist-high rock wall meant to keep visitors from plunging off the sheer ledge. It was a great view. I thought about suicides—someone could easily jump over that wall into eternity.It looked painfully rocky below. I wouldn’t stop them.
Native American vendors spread blankets over the wall and displayed handmade jewelry and fetishes despite prohibition signs that warned of penalties and fines. It seemed to be a regular market. I saw Mike wander to a middle age Navajo woman. She lacked interest in having a conversation with me when I bought a couple of souvenir trinkets from her and tried to talk to her about reservations. Mike could talk to her about designing a curb to channel the Colorado River’s course all the way to its final desitination. We were burning daylight.
I said, ‘time to go.’”
Mike said, “Catch you later.”
I wanted a guide to the world beyond, but he wasn’t much of a guide. We met on US 95 and parted on I-40. left him at the viewpoint. I was always the one who left. He stayed in Norfolk when I went to Alabama. After college, marriage, and Army, I returned, lived nearby with my family for ten years and left again. Mike never moved away from Norfolk.
I was the one who felt the need to reconnect. He didn’t. I tried to stay in touch. After years without connection, I called everyone I could think of to track him down. He changed his number without telling me. Now, he existed as my delusion. Left behind, I might enjoy the scenery, navigate traffic, and miss fewer exits.
I pointed my rig east. Mike had no history here. His family had never been west. This was my trip, my memories to recall. Mike was here because of me. I traveled these roads with Mom and Dad when Dad’s orders shuttled us between the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
Mom and Dad were from country people rooted in the southeast. Dad’s forebears entered North America through Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. They stopped in Alabama, bought Indian lands from the govenment land office. They lived in a three-county area until war and opportuniies pushed them elsewhere. Mom’s people landed in New Bern, North Carolina. They owned farms until hard times forced them into sharecropping. Neither side of the family boasted noble origins. Some of those early arrivals to the New World might have been indentured servants or convicts from English prisons.
After Japan surrendered, Dad shipped over, got married, and was stationed in Maryland. He met Mom in New York City. During the war, she worked in a Pentagon secretarial pool for the Marine Corps. They met ‘46, and my older sister was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital in ‘48. I was born in in ’50 in a Navy hospital on a Marine Corps base in North Carolina. Dad was deployed on a destroyer. I asked him about Korea. He said, “It was a funny war. No one knew what was going on.” I thought as a radioman he would have known more, but that was all he ever said about it.
When the Korea Peninsula ceased hostilities, Dad got orders to report to Pearl Harbor. We packed into his ’53 Chevy and drove west on Route 66. In Long Beach, we boarded a ship bound for Hawaii, where my younger sister was born at an Army hospital in Honolulu. Our family was complete.
In Pearl Harbor’s Navy housing, we lived among other junior enlisted families, all in the same economic bracket. Parents were close in age. In the parking lot that separated our identical rows of townhomes, children played together around the dumpster. It was our meeting place, a fort we climbed into, on top and al over. Coconut palms dropped fruit in our yard, and the banyan trees between apartments sheltered large cockroaches. We had a dog. I attended kindergarten in a Quonset hut. Really, great times.
When Dad was transferred to Norfolk, we flew to California on a seaplane, picked up his car and motered back east on Rute 66. In Norfolk, he taught sailors how to send and receive Morse code.
We crossed the country four times, always along Route 66. I don’t remember the first two crossings, but I’m sure we stopped to visit Dad’s family. Those visits were less joyful than the ones with Mom’s parents, who spoiled us more than we deserved.
With every paycheck, Dad bought U.S. Savings Bonds, and eventually, had enough to buy a three-bedroom ranch house with an attached garage in a post war baby boom subdivision. Our home was built on reclaimed wetlands that drained into the Chesapeake Bay. Northeastern storms regularly flooded our low-lying yard.
When I was in fourth grade, we returned to Hawaii so Dad could become the senior Chief in the Barbers Point Naval Air Station Communications Center. We packed and headed west again on Route 66. About that trip, I remember tedious days in the back seat with my sisters. At least we were out of school, and Mom entertained us with stories of her childhood in the country. Hearing about farm, kinfolk and the Depression–I grew up knowing I derived from country people.
We boarded ship in California and docked in Honolulu. While we waited for Navy housing, we lived in a downtown apartment where I tried to fit in with the mix of Polynesian and Asian children. Being a fourth-grade haole in Waikiki was tough. I was fresh off the boat and one of the whitest kids in the schoolyard. When we finally moved into the Capehart Housing housing development in Ewa Beach, families were all Navy and segregated by rank. We shopped at the same stores, saw the same doctors, and lived in identical duplexes. Nobody considered Hawaii home; we were all just passing through.
Ethnicity wasn’t an issue. My best friend was from Guam. My Sunday School teacher was an African-American graduate from Annapolis and the base’s Executive Officer. His kids were my classmates. As enlisted men’s children, we weren’t allowed into the officers’ section of the base, but we all went to the same school, took the same tests, and learned the same lessons.
We left Hawaii on an ocean cruise from Honolulu to Long Beach, California. It began with an on board Aloha party. Friends and shipmates celebrated our departure, adults with liquor stayed in one room, children in another. Images from the party are frozen in photographs. When our ship pulled from the dock, we threw leis into the harbor. If they floated shore, we would return to the islands.
It was Dad’s farewell to a Naval career, a transpacific voyage on a Matson Liner. With bars, buffets, swimming pools and formal dining, our cruise to Long Beach was high class. We never traveled in luxury before or after. On the drive back east, once again on Rpute 66, Dad drank at night. I sympathize with him. I spent a couple of hours in the back seat of a minivan with my grandkids and wanted a drink afterward.
Mom believed his drinking stemmed from childhood trauma. She never liked his Alabama family and blamed them for his problems. I never heard him speak badly of them, but he never told me much. I learned his favorite sister died in a Tuscaloosa asylum. The story came from the widow of his oldest brother. She described the death as an “accident” and offered no details. When I mentioned it to Mom, she said Dad once said he had a sister “who lost her mind.”
My parents are gone. If any relatives from their generation are alive, I don’t know them. My sisters live in North Carolina. As far as I know, neither Mom, my sisters, nor I have been diagnosed with mental illness. I’ve been certified sane. Dad’s shock therapy, antidepressants, and Jim Beam couldn’t heal him. He died in a VA facility, three days before my high school graduation. At the time, I had middling grades, no prospects, and didn’t care about the dysfunctional genes in my DNA.
I tried working for wages but either quit or got fired. I took drugs, dropped out of college and lived in fear of arrest. With a car, pocket change, and leftover VA scholarship money, I escaped to a teacher’s college in south Alabama. Mike left for a two year stint in the Army, and returned as often as he could. Norfolk was always his home. Leaving him on an I 40 overlook wasn’t hard. The road ahead unfurled like magic four-lane carpet, and Grace Slick sang “White Rabbit.” The desert droned in tune at 70 miles per hour.
I camped near the Arizona Crater where a meteor slammed into the earth 50,000 years ago. It was my third night. I ate grilled cheese, slurped tomato soup, and slept.